Persistent Systems Ltd (NSE: PERSISTENT) Q4 2025 Earnings Call dated Apr. 24, 2025
Corporate Participants:
Saurabh Dwivedi — Head of Corporate Development & Investor Relations
Anand Deshpande — Founder, Chairman, and Managing Director
Sandeep Kalra — Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director
Vinit Teredesai — Chief Financial Officer
Unidentified Speaker
Analysts:
Unidentified Participant
Presentation:
Operator
And gentlemen, good day and welcome to Persistent Systems Earnings Conference Call for the 4th-Quarter of FY ’25 ended, 31 March 2025. We have with us on the call today Dr Pande, Chairman and Managing Director; Mr Sandeep Kalra, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer; Mr Vineet There Desai, Chief Financial Officer; and Mr Saurabh Diwedi, Head of Investor Relations.
Please note that all participants’ line will be in listen-only mode and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after management’s opening remarks. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please raise your hand from the participant tab on the screen.
While asking questions, request you to please identify yourself and your company. Please note, this conference is being recorded. I now hand over the conference to Mr Saurab. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Saurabh Dwivedi — Head of Corporate Development & Investor Relations
Thank you, Anand. Let me quickly outline the agenda for today’s call. Anand will open the call with his opening remarks. Sandeep will then share an overview of our results and commentary on business. Vineet will take you through the financial details and key operational metrics for this quarter.
I will then provide an overview of our key deal wins and awards and recognitions for this quarter. Sandeep will come back for a quick summary of the prepared remarks, post which we will open the conference for questions. Let me also remind you that as part of our prepared remarks and during Q&A, we may make certain statements which are forward-looking and may involve significant uncertainty.
Persistent does not take any responsibility to update such forward-looking statements and your discretion is warranted while making any investment decisions. With this, let me hand over to Anand for his remarks.
Anand Deshpande — Founder, Chairman, and Managing Director
Thank you, Sauragh. This year marks the 35th anniversary of Persistent Systems, a journey that we began in 1990 with a simple but ambitious vision to build a technology company from India that delivers global impact. Over the past 3.5 decades, we have stayed true to that vision, growing steadily and shaping ourselves into a digital engineering leader trusted by customers worldwide. Within that larger journey, this month we celebrate a special milestone, 15th year since our listing on the National Stock Exchange on April 6, 2010.
This is a moment to pause, reflect and to express deep gratitude. This journey has been about building with purpose, combining technology, talent and trust to solve real-world problems. It has been about staying resilient and future focused. I want to take this opportunity to thank all those who have walked alongside with us, our passionate employees, committed leadership, forward-looking customers and dedicated partners.
A special word of appreciation to our investors and the analyst community. Your confidence, insights and support have been invaluable in shaping our growth story and fueling our ambition. To give you a sense of what we have collectively achieved, INR1 lakh invested in persistent shares at the time of IPO would be worth over INR70 lakhs today, excluding dividends.
I consider myself to be incredibly fortunate to have been part of this journey. With that, let me now hand over to Sandeep for the quarterly and annual updates. Thank you.
Sandeep Kalra — Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director
Thank you, Anand. Before I start with the update on the quarter, I’m pleased to share with you that our CFO, has been inducted as an additional Director on the persistent Board. I look-forward to working with him for the continued success of our company. Let me now start with a quick financial summary.
Coming to Q4 FY ’25 first, we delivered revenues of USD375.2 million. This translates to a growth of 4.2% quarter-on-quarter and 20.7% year-on-year. In rupee terms, the growth for the quarter came in at 5.9% quarter-on-quarter and 25.2% year-on-year. In constant-currency term, this translates into a quarterly growth of 4.5% quarter-on-quarter.
This quarter marks our 20th sequential-quarter of revenue growth. The EBIT margin for the quarter came in at 15.6%, translating into an EBIT growth of 10.9% quarter-on-quarter and 34.9% year-on-year. The profit-after-tax for the quarter came in at 12.2%.
Coming to the full-year financial year ’25, we achieved revenues of $1409.1 million, giving us 18.8% year-on-year growth. In rupee terms, this translates to year-on-year growth of 21.6%. The EBIT margin for FY ’25 came in at 14.7% compared to 14.4% for FY ’24. The profit-after-tax for the full-year came in at 11.7%.
Vineet will go over with detailed color on the financials and margin moment later in this call. Now coming to the order book for the quarter. The total contract value for Q4 came in at $517.5 million with TCV of new bookings coming in at US dollar, $329 million. The annual contract value of this TCV is $350.2 million, out of which the ACV from new bookings contributed to USD198.1 million.
The total contract value for full financial year came in at $2.1 billion, while the corresponding ACV was US dollar, 1.5 billion. Most of you are aware that we typically see higher quantum of renewals and hence booking in the December quarter, given the fact that 80% of our revenues emanate from the US. And this period corresponds to-end of financial year for our North American customers.
The sequential decline of bookings in the quarter reflects this seasonality that we have observed in previous years as well. Also, please note that our revenue conversion on a quarterly basis is a function of annual contract value bookings done in previous quarters as well as the conversion from multi-year deals booked in previous years, which are included in our TCV bookings that we announced on a quarterly basis.
Coming to the client engagement size. Now let me give you some color on our client movement across various reported categories. This quarter, we witnessed healthy year-on-year growth among our client buckets with our top-five customer revenue growing by 35.3%, top-10 By 27.3%, top-20 by 25.1% and top-50 by 23.3%. The contribution from top-10 customers is 42.2% in this quarter compared to 40% in Q4 FY ’24. All our top client buckets have shown good growth in this quarter compared to the same quarter last year. Customers with annual revenues more than 75 million-plus increased from 2 million to-4 million on a year-on-year basis. Those with 50 million-plus annual revenue increased from 3 to-4 million in 10 million-plus, the bucket increased from 17 to 21 and I’m also very pleased to highlight that we saw a significant jump-in customers with annual revenues more than $5 million with the number of customers in this category increasing from 40 to 55 over the last one year. Finally, the number of customers with annual revenue more than $1 million increased from $178 to $191. These numbers demonstrate our ability to scale customer relationships significantly over-time. Coming to the details of our geographic presence, performance. In terms of year-on-year growth, this quarter in USD terms, North-America revenue grew 21.3%, Europe grew 30.6%, India grew 10.6% and rest of the world grew 8.6%. For the full-year FY ’25, North-America grew 20.6%, Europe grew 7.4%, India 12.5% and rest of the world grew by 34.5%. Now let me give you this quarter’s performance from an industry segment perspective. Compared to the same quarter last year, Healthcare, Life Sciences and banking Financial services industry verticals grew by 33.6% and 26.6% respectively on a year-on-year basis. Our software and high-tech and emerging vertical registered a growth of 9.7% year-on-year. For the full-year ’25, Healthcare and life sciences vertical grew 54%, banking Financial services grew 17.8%, while software and high-tech vertical grew 3.7%. Coming to an update on the dividend side. Our Board of Directors recommended a final dividend of INR15 per share. This is an addition to the interim dividend of INR20 per share that was declared in January 2025. It’s our endeavor to maintain a consistent dividend payout ratio while we augment our growth through capability-led acquisitions. Coming to an update on our customer events. In keeping with our tradition, we marked the end of each financial year-by organizing customer events in major cities, connecting with our customers and expressing our gratitude towards the strong partnerships that they have with us. Our New York event this year was hosted in the iconic NASDAQ tower, which was well-attended by our key customers, partners and employees. On this occasion, we also marked the US launch of the Persistent Foundation with $1 million commitment towards the same. We’ll also be having similar events in the Bay Area as well as Seattle over the next one-week. Coming to the progress we have made on our AI roadmap across the two key pillars, AI for technology and AI for business. As previously discussed, our AI strategy is anchored around four pillars. First, coming to AI for technology. Here we are pivoting on two sites. One, on one-hand, we are working with leading technology companies and hyperscalers in helping them engineer their platforms, leveraging our core expertise in-product development as well as creating robust back-end connectors, enabling seamless integration and scalability for our enterprise customers. Our work with these companies is foundational to the ability to enable AI in enterprises over-time. Another paradigm of this AI for tech pivot includes building our Gen AI-enabled platform Saswa to accelerate software development for technology companies as well as application development for our enterprise customers. Saswa has end-to-end capabilities natively built into the platform and also integrates with third-party ecosystem partners across the software development life-cycle, helping our customers leverage their existing investments. Our second anchor is with respect to AI for business as a part of which we are incorporating an agentric reasoning layer to transform traditional back-end business logic into dynamic agent driven workflows. Our investments in Gen AI Hub and IORA platforms are accelerating our agentic AI roadmap with our enterprise customers. Our solutions span across industry verticals, delivering agentic experiences such as fraud detection and loan origination in banking and drug discovery, patient engagement and prescription refills in healthcare, just to give you some examples. Building these agenic workflows is also spawning off significant amount of data plumping and engineering engagement for us with our enterprise customers. A testament to this is the 50% plus growth of our data and AI practice in each of the last two years on back of significant wins across Fortune 1,000 customers on such programs. The third pillar of our AI strategy is undertaking inorganic investments to enhance our capabilities. The acquisition of Starfish Fish has given us the ability to disrupt the contact center domain from a horizontal solution perspective and is very relevant to our customers in the tech domain or banking financial services or healthcare life sciences. Adding on to that was our acquisition of ARCA that enables us to add important capabilities with respect to data privacy and governance, whether it comes to our platforms and offerings or our offerings based on third-party platforms. Finally, the fourth pillar is to use all our AI-related investments and capabilities to transform business models in which we engage with our customers. Our endeavor is to get into more outcome driven and other differentiated commercial models so that while we create significant value for our customers, we are also able to retain a relevant part of this benefit for ourselves and invest in increased R&D as we go along. This should reflect in revenue and margin per employee on our end getting enhanced over a period of time. Let me now share with you some details on the progress we have made on SASWAR and some key case studies. In terms of, we have filed 15 new patents this quarter, taking the total patent count to 35, covering innovations like backlog prioritization, LLM-driven security simulations and dynamic data pipeline orchestration. In addition to these patterns, recent feature updates to SASPAR include OSIS remediation factory for automated open-source vulnerability management, modernization factory for structured application migration and tech debt remediation, AI-powered L0 to L3 support integrating Gen AI into enterprise support workflows. We are seeing satisfied adoption in customer programs such as technical debt remediation, text moderation, language upgrades, core product transformation and automated bulk fixes. One of the largest deals that we won in this year in this domain and which is in current execution is for a large SaaS provider where we are helping them adopt enterprise-wide, enabling modern ways of product development, boosting developer productivity and accelerating product release cycles in a major multiyear engagement. Now coming on to the strategic partnerships. In terms of the various partnerships that we have with hyperscalers and others, just a brief update on that. We have established a strategic partnership and integrated Gen AI hub with NVIDIA, Inferences Microservices, NIM, NIM in short for agent-based AI using NVIDIA’s AI Foundry models. In terms of Google, we continue to enhance our partnership and we have been recognized as an implementation partner for Google’s AI Developer Foundation and we are working closely with Google to launch AI solutions specific to healthcare and life sciences. An example of such a solution is our Omni KG aimed at accelerating biomedical research for healthcare companies. This was launched in Q4 in collaboration with Google and. In terms of IBM, we were awarded as the first runner-up in the 2024 call for code ecosystem engagement-based on our IBM Watson X AI-powered sustainability platform. In terms of sales force, we have successfully completed 10,000 plus sales force certifications and also expanded agent Force adoption across 32 plus of our customers. Coming to data and AI-specific partnerships, we have developed an agent-based AI framework and solution for managed services offerings leveraging IORA for databricks and Snowflake platform lead engagements. In summary, we are very pleased with our performance in Q4 FY ’25. I would now like to invite Vineet to give a detailed color on the quarterly financials and related matters.
Vinit Teredesai — Chief Financial Officer
Look you, Sandeep. Good day-to all of you. Thank you for taking time-out to join us today. Let me now take you through the financial highlights for the quarter and year gone by. Q4 of FY ’25 revenue stood at $375.2 million US dollars, registering a year-on-year growth of 20.7%.
In rupee terms, it translates to $32,421.1 million, a growth of 25.2% year-on-year. Revenue for the full-year FY ’25 was $1,409.1 million with a growth — with a growth of 18.8% year-on-year. In rupee terms, the same stood at INR119,387.2 million, a year-over-year growth of 21.6%. EBIT margin for Q4 FY ’25 came in at 15.6%, 70 basis-point improvement Sequentially and 110 basis-point improvement year-on-year.In rupee terms, EBIT for this quarter was INR5,052.9 million, translating to a growth of 10.9% quarter-on-quarter and 34.9% year-on-year. EBIT for the full-year FY ’25 stood at 14.7% as against 14.4% in FY ’24. Let me now give you a quarter-on-quarter EBIT margin walkthrough. Starting with the tailwinds this quarter, improved utilization helped margins improve by-20 basis-point. Reduction in sales, general and administration cost has helped us the margins with 30 basis-point. A marginally higher earn-out credit versus the previous quarter helped margin improve by-20 basis-point. Please note that all earn-out related adjustment for the acquisitions done till FY ’24 have now been accounted for. Finally, favorable currency movement helped margin improve by-40 basis-point. Certain multi-year managed services deals, which include lab setup for the customer along with procuring third-party tools and licenses have increased the component of IP revenues this quarter, some of which contributed lower margins, leading to a headwind of 40 basis-points. All these headwinds and tailwinds put together resulted in a net increase of 70 basis-points in our EBIT margin sequentially. Also taking into account company performance for FY ’25, one-time realignment was made between SOP costs and salary wages and bonus offsetting each other with no material impact on the P&L. Other income, net of finance costs stood at INR153.5 million against INR118.4 million last quarter some of you may remember that we had invested INR430 million in fixed deposit of ILSS for which we have subsequently taken a 100% provision in Q4 of FY ’20, given that ILFS went through an insolvency process. As a part of NCLT process, we have now received INR21.2 million during Q4 of FY ’25, which has been partly contributed to the increase in other income. We will update all of you if we receive any more payments in future against this investment. There was a foreign-exchange loss of INR154.3 million as against a gain of INR144.7 million in Q3, primarily on account of rupeat appreciation towards the end-of-the quarter, which results in restatement of our outstanding receivables and our outstanding hedges. Effective tax-rate for the quarter came in at 21.7% compared to 22.6% in Q3. Effective tax-rate for the full-year FY ’25 was 23.2% and we expect our overall effective tax-rate to remain in the range of 23% to 23.5% going-forward. Profit-after-tax was INR3,957.6 million, a growth of 25.5% year-on-year. This translates to PAT margin of 12.2%. Earnings per share were INR250 per share in Q4 of FY ’25 compared to INR240 per share in the previous quarter. Year-on-year growth in EPS was 23%. We registered a full-year PAT of INR14,16 million in FY ’25, translating to a growth of 28% year-over-year-on-year. PAT margin for the full-year FY ’25 stood at 11.7% as against 11.1% in the previous year. EPS for full-year financial ’25 was at INR9120 per share with a growth of 25.9% year-over-year excluding cash from capital employed, return on capital employed for Q4 FY ’25 came in at 39.7% versus 35.7% same quarter last year. Total cash and investments stood at $270 million as of 31st March 2025. In this quarter, billed DSO came in at 58 days, an improvement of six days compared to the last quarter, while unbilled DSO came in at 23 days, an increase of 1 day compared to Q3 of FY ’25. Our OCF to PAT for Q4 FY ’25 stands at 108.4%. Forward contracts outstanding as of 31st March 2025 were $300 million at an average rate of INR86.3 rupees per dollar. Now let me give you some key operational updates. At the end of Q4, our total headcount stood at 24,594, an increase of 744 from Q4 of previous financial year. Trailing-12 months attrition this quarter came in at 12.9% compared to 11.5% in Q4 of last year and it continues to be within our acceptable range. I’m pleased to share with you that in-line with our endeavor to maintain a consistent dividend payout ratio, the Board of Directors has recommended a final dividend of INR15 per share, taking the total dividend for the full-year to INR35 per share. This is to acknowledge 35th anniversary of the company and 15th anniversary of listing on the National Stock Exchange of India. This translates into dividend payout ratio of 39%. The final dividend recommended by the Board is subject to approval by the shareholders at the ensuing Annual General Meeting. Coming to ESG updates for the quarter, persistent was featured on the NASDAQ Market Site Tower in Times Square for winning awards at the ICSI, Business Responsibility and Sustainability Key Awards and National Awards for Excellence in Corporate Governance. Additionally, we were recognized at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, Sustainability Reporting Awards 23-24, highlighting our dedication to responsible and transparent practices. Persistent has been included in the top 10% of S&P Global 2025 Sustainability, reaffirming our commitment to responsible business practices and long-term ESG impact. Out of 7,690 companies assist, only 780 across 62 industries were included in the 2025 Sustainability Airport based on the S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment Scope. Since February 2025, we have achieved 100% renewable energy sourcing for all our own locations in Pune, Nagpur and Goa through solar rooftops, wind energy and green tariffs from. Let me now hand over to Saurav for commentary on the key deal wins and awards and recognitions we have received during the quarter.
Saurabh Dwivedi — Head of Corporate Development & Investor Relations
Thank you, Vineet. Let me begin with software, high-tech and emerging industries, our largest vertical. Persistent was selected by one of the leading security service edge companies providing security products to large banks and Fortune 500 companies to accelerate its product engineering roadmap.
Persistent strong relationship with the private-equity owner of the company and strong security domain credentials were instrumental in winning this engagement. The benefit to the customer includes acceleration of its product roadmap across data loss prevention and hybrid secure web gateway offerings as well as improved product robustness and compliance.
Persistent was selected by one of the leading software providers to nonprofit organizations to set-up an offshore research and development center. Persistent’s product engineering heritage along with the experience of working with private-equity sponsored technology companies was instrumental in winning this engagement.
The benefit to the customer includes AI-driven innovation across product lines and driving operational efficiencies through the offshore research Center of Excellence. Persistent was selected by one of the leading cybersecurity companies to take-over its offshore security operations center. Persistent’s existing capabilities in the SOC domain was instrumental in winning this engagement.
The benefit to the customer includes 24×7 monitoring of the customer, SOC, service-level benchmarking and its continuous improvement. Coming to banking, financial services and insurance. Persistent was selected by a global leader in tax, accounting and cash-flow management software to develop, enhance and maintain an AI-driven analytics platform for its analysts.
But persistent’s long-term engagement and understanding of the clients’ technology architecture was instrumental in winning this engagement. The benefit to the customer includes the availability of curated data to improve the productivity of business analysts who are leading automation and inciting initiatives. Persistent was selected by one of the largest US-based financial services firms To create a data platform for regulatory compliance, persistence capabilities in and successful delivery on multiple data and analytics projects for the customer was instrumental in winning this engagement. The benefit to the customer includes smooth integration across multiple applications and improved accuracy of regulatory reporting. Persistent was selected by a leading UK. Based payment solutions provider to undertake architectural assessment followed by development and modernization of its payments platform. Persistent’s capabilities in the payments domain and in cloud and contact center space were instrumental in winning this engagement. The benefit to the customer includes enhanced compliance and security, improved integration with contact center and other platforms in the payment network. And finally, within our healthcare and life sciences vertical. Persistent was selected by one of the largest healthcare companies in the world for migration of data assets from Terra platform on-premise to Databricks and Snowflake on the Azure cloud. Persistent successful track-record in the migration domain and AI and machine-learning capabilities helped in winning this engagement. The benefit of the customer includes scaling AI adoption for enhanced patient data management, faster claims processing and advanced analytics across the organization. Persistent was selected by one of the largest contract research organizations to become a product engineering partner to its research and development solutions organization. Persistent Saswa-led solution approach coupled with successful delivery across other projects with the customer was instrumental in us winning this engagement. The benefit to the customer includes 30% faster releases, improvement in engineering productivity and quality assurance. Persistent was selected by one of the leading contract research and development organizations to transform its IT infrastructure and provide managed services support. Persistent’s extensive experience and contract research and develop with contract research and development organizations was instrumental in winning this engagement. The benefit of the customer includes Gen AI-led operational efficiency and compliance with good manufacturing practice in the life sciences services industry. Moving on to the awards and recognitions for the quarter. This quarter saw us get continued recognition from industry-leading analyst firms and associations. To cite a few, Persistent was named a leader in the 2024 ISG provider lens for advanced analytics and AI Services US and featured in the Gartner Market Guide for Generative AI Services for banking. This highlights our expertise in delivering Gen AI solutions for efficiency, risk mitigation and digital transformation. Was named as a leader in Everest peak metrics assessment on custom Application development services 2025 Global. We were commended on for, our AI-powered platform that delivers productivity gains and automation across the customer application development life-cycle. Persistent won the Google Cloud Infrastructure Modernization Partner Award for successful execution of one of the largest Google Cloud migrations. We were recognized for migrating 6,000 plus micro-services, 100 plus petabytes of data and large-scale AI/ML workloads for a leading e-commerce platform to Google Cloud. Persistent was cited a leader in 2024 ISC provider lens, insurance, ITO services, mid-market North-America. Persistent was recognized for deep domain expertise built through collaboration with leading insurers, third-party administrators, fintechs and diverse industry players. Persistent made a powerful debut with top rankings for client satisfaction and innovation in the European IT Outsourcing study by Whitelane Research. Persistent was ranked fourth in the overall ranking and second in the category of transformative innovation. Percession was named a leader in 2024 ISG Provider Lens Intelligent Automation Services US. Percession was recognized at the prestigious Economic Times Human Capital Awards 2025 across multiple categories, underscoring our excellence in people practices. And finally, our CEO, Sandeep Kalra was honored as a tech titan at BT India’s Best CEO Awards 2025. With that, then let me hand it back to Sandeep.
Sandeep Kalra — Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director
Thank you,. Let me conclude our prepared remarks by saying that we will continue to strengthen our capabilities in the upcoming areas such as AI as well as in our sales channels and proactively engage with our customers striving for top-quartile growth in our sector. Given the recent developments in geopolitics and macroeconomic factors around that, we see an increased level of caution and decision-making from our customers and prospects.
However, as always, we are focused on being close to our customers and prospects, helping them solve their business challenges, be it growth or cost optimization. We remain committed to our goal of reaching $2 billion by end of FY ’27 and are well on that trajectory. With this, let me request the operator to open the floor for questions. Operator?
Questions and Answers:
Operator
Thank you, sir. We will now open the call for Q&A session. We will wait for a few minutes until the queue assembles. We request participants to restrict to two questions and then return back to the queue for more questions. Please raise your hand from the participant tab on the screen to ask a question.
The first question is from Ravi Menon
Unidentified Participant
Hi, thanks and congrats on a good quarter in this challenging environment. So I wanted to ask you about the healthcare vertical in particular. There are concerns that providers and payers are under a lot of pressure because there are unexpected costs in Medicare customers and also lower payments from the US federal government.
I know that you have relatively small wallet share among these customers, but do you see this as an opportunity or do you think there are possible headwinds in these accounts?
Sandeep Kalra
Thanks,. So very valid point. And from our perspective, if you look at it, we have continued to grow in the healthcare segment pretty nicely. There are puts and takes with the those attempts and the USA attempts to cut cost in various departments and that is downstream also leading to a certain amount of our customers getting impacted.
But I’m pretty sure in a bigger-picture, if you look at it, this is going to emanate newer opportunities for us to help our customers optimize their costs and so on. So overall, we are bullish on the healthcare the healthcare sector. And again, as a company, if you look at it last year, healthcare grew very well. And towards the last two quarters, we saw the banking financial services as well as the tech sector come up very nicely for us. So in some of parts, we are very confident of overall growth.
And even within healthcare, we are pretty confident we will have a decent trajectory. There may be a few quarters here or there because of all these macroeconomic and those and USA impacts to our customers. But overall, both healthcare and the company should do well.
Unidentified Participant
Thanks, Sandeep. And on banks specifically, BFSR, we’ve seen really good report — results by the banks, but people are worried that there too spending might actually be cut-back on discretionary programs. And I think there is overall a perception that a person perhaps is more exposed to discretionary programs and when it comes to cost takeout, you may not benefit. Can you talk a bit about that, please?
Sandeep Kalra
Yeah. So I think, Ravi, it’s been many, many quarters. We have clarified many times, it’s whether it is a good economy or a bad economy, we have proven it over the last several cycles. We are not dependent on discretionary spend. And if you look at it in the last quarter when we announced a fairly large win from a financial services customer, it was a vendor consolidation among other things that we did with them.
And so we are very well-poised for cost optimization, vendor consolidation and the likes. And even our platforms like Saswa, if you look at what we are trying to do there, they lend themselves very well to bringing more productivity gains, not just through labor arbitrage, but through technology using. So we are very confident we have to figure out our own revenue pools with our existing customers and so that should not — I don’t think discretionary spend should be a concern for our investors.
Unidentified Participant
And one last question, you were talking earlier about how you want to now let the SC&A leverage play-out because we’ve made heavy sales investments over the last couple of years when the market was slow. Now this year, it looks like the market will still be slow. So do you want to continue to invest in sales?
Maybe even if it means margins don’t improve?
Sandeep Kalra
Yeah. So two-parts to it. If you look at our margins, I’ll start with that. Our exit run-rate is 15.6% from an EBIT perspective. Our full-year is at 14.7%. And our last — so last year was 14.4%. So 14.4% to 14.7% year-on-year. Last quarter exit 15.6%. If we execute in a disciplined way, even if we were to look at the investments that we plan to do and we do plan to invest in sales and marketing, if we invest in-line with the revenue growth that we intend to have, growth will always be the priority number-one.
Margin improvement, priority number two, but we are on a decent trajectory. At an entry run-rate of 15.6% for the year, even if we were to keep it flat or tad bit lower, we will still deliver 100 basis-points aspirationally. That is our goal, but we’ll let the market conditions and other things pan-out. We control what we control from an operational perspective, we have a good hand. So I’ll leave it at that.
Unidentified Participant
Thanks so much. Best of luck.
Operator
Next question is from Sandeep Shah
Unidentified Participant
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity and congrats on a good execution in a difficult environment. Just wanted to understand, Sandeep, regarding one of your large account in the healthcare has given a profit warning just few days back. So will it create any uncertainty though you sounded optimistic about the healthcare, but may result into some large client-specific issue in this account?
And also in terms of your view in the sector vertical-wise growth in the coming year given the macro uncertainty being higher? And then I have couple of questions for.
Sandeep Kalra
Sure. So at a high-level, if you look at it, so yeah, I understand what you’re talking about the large customer, but our healthcare vertical, obviously the large customer is there and then there are many others. And within the large customer that we have, we have multiple different programs that we are engaged on.
And some of these are long-range programs, which are spanning multiple years. So as of this point in time, we don’t see a reason for us to be worried on that. We are working very closely with our customers, large or small in understanding how we need to help them in their challenges.
Now outside of that, if you look at it, if I was to pack the order persistence are some of parts of these three industry verticals, healthcare, life sciences on one-side, BFSI and tech. In my mind, BFSI and tech should lead the growth in this year, followed by healthcare licenses. And healthcare licenses has led the growth for the last six quarters.
So it’s in a fairly good shape, but I do believe BFSI and Tech should lead the growth for the coming year.
Unidentified Participant
Yeah, just to the last couple of questions,, this year, if you look at intangible asset under development has gone up and closer to 50 bps to the revenue on an incremental basis. What I’m saying is the entry, which is reflected on the balance sheet rather than the P&L. So what is the nature of the same? And second, on the operating cash-flow, if you look at the improvement has not been in-line with the revenue growth.
So any aspirational target entering FY ’26 in terms of cash generation?
Sandeep Kalra
So, in terms of the intangible asset, it is on a two counts. One, we did acquisitions during the year as a result of which there is an addition to the intangible asset. Secondly, as Sandeep mentioned in his opening comments, we continue to invest on Saswa, our AI platform. And as a result of that, there are many patents that have been piled.
So there is a lot of intellectual property that also is getting developed as a part and parcel of the overall — as a part of our overall contribution. And as a result of that, there is some there is some increase there.
Vinit Teredesai
The second part in terms of your OCF operational cash-flow, if you look at this quarter, it has improved to 8.9% and this remains to be our range. We want to be in the 100% to 120% range. If you compare it with the last quarter, it has shown a significant amount of improvement.
If you look at our DSO, which is a major driver to the OCF, it has improved by six days. The build DSO has come down by six days. Our aspiration continues to remain that OCF should continue to be above 100% and we are working on it.
Unidentified Participant
Thank you. All the best.
Operator
The next question is from Manik Taneja
Unidentified Participant
Hi, thank you for the opportunity and congratulations once again for steady performance. This question was in regards to our healthcare vertical once again. When I look at this revenue by customers, it appears that the top single customer has once again grown while we’ve seen a sharp decline in the rest of the healthcare portfolio.
If you could talk about that as well as the potential margin implications of some of the — some of the one-time gains that we saw in FY ’25 not being there. In that context, what will be the levers to drive margin expansion in-line with our three-year strategy?
Sandeep Kalra
Yeah. So if you look at the healthcare vertical, as we said before, so there is — there are multiple factors happening there. On one-side, there is a impact on various things, whether it is Department of Human Health, Human Services and so on. The other side is the US aid funding getting cut for various folks across the globe, including the US and others.
So as a part of that, many — if you talk to many of the stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem, anyone who was doing research and was funded by the government, all of that funding has vanished overnight. And similarly, if you look at it, that funding is used to buy software, equipment, services for clinical trials, many other things from the various parts of the ecosystem.
So that’s putting a little bit of a stress on the system and that also is putting a stress on government-funded healthcare plans. And so one of our customers did have a little bit of a rundown and that adjusted for that also healthcare vertical for us grew. So if I look at our overall pipeline, if I look at our overall scaling of healthcare or overall the company and at some of parts, if I look at the BFSI vertical, if I look at the tech vertical, we are fairly confident company will grow.
Healthcare, we have a very decent pipeline outside of the bigger customer and any of those impacted customers by whatever I said. So we are reasonably confident that we live in a bigger macro. We’ll let it pan-out, but we are confident that the company will grow. And again, we have proven in the last three cycles across the last five-plus years our ability to pivot in different kinds of environment. So I will leave it there. In terms of the margin levers, I’ll let Vineet talk about it.
Vinit Teredesai
Yeah. No, I know the way you look at it that for — even if healthcare doesn’t grow as much as what it has grown in FY ’25, there are other verticals which are growing and they are going to at a pretty decent pace and they are generating enough margin. There are many levers at this point of time.
As I said, we have been — while our utilization is high, at this point of time, we anticipate that this may remain in the tight range for some more period of time when the uncertainty prevails. There are pricing levers that we work on very, very diligently to improve and get incremental impact on our benefit on our revenue.
So these are all the things which will continue. SG&A, while as a percentage is closely watched, to continue to make investment, but at the same time, they also — the investment also yields benefit in terms of the growth that we are delivering. So net-net, we are pretty much confident, we are pretty much on-track in terms of delivering our aspiration target of improving our margins by 200 to 300 basis-points as we hit the — as we hit the $2 billion revenue target by FY ’27.
Operator
Thank you. The next question is from Abhishek.
Unidentified Participant
Yeah. Hi, am I audible?
Unidentified Speaker
Yes, please.
Unidentified Participant
Yeah. Hi, Sandeep. Congrats again on a consistent quarter. So I had a couple of questions, right. Firstly, as you say, you are still on-track to hit that $2 billion revenue run-rate by FY ’27. How should we think about the growth split between FY ’26 and ’27? I mean, in the context of the current macros, should we expect a bit of short-term snags and then maybe an acceleration in ’27 or are you confident that your deal wins and your pipeline give you sort of probably an even split between now and let’s say, FY ’27, right?
That’s one. And the second question is on the healthcare deal. I understand that there could be offshoring that might come in from next quarter. Do you think this probably gives us an added benefit in terms of margins going-forward and how should we model this particular event going ahead?
And just last question on the platform-led revenues and. Do you think the current sort of development kind of pushes back the uptake of your platform services by, let’s say, a few months and is there any way to quantify you know what percentage of our incremental revenues are coming from platform services and how they should, let’s say, evolve going-forward? Thank you so much.
Sandeep Kalra
Yeah. So there’s a bunch of questions on that. So let me first address that. So let’s start with the basics. The quarter we delivered was $375.2 million. We multiply that by four, we are at a run-rate of $1.5 billion. Now you take the growth rate on that if we were to deliver a certain growth rate over the quarters.
And I’m not just looking at 1/4, two quarters. The like we are living in right now, the macroeconomic thing changes on a day-to-day basis. So — and we don’t give forward-looking guidance. So it will be unfair for us to put out any number for this year versus next. All we are saying is with eight quarters to reach the destination that we have aspirationally of $2 billion.
And that’s an aspiration. That’s not a guidance, but we can clearly see the path to that. So we are on that path. And whether it happens more in this next quarter or in the next several quarters, the acceleration happens, it will happen and we have proven over the last 20 quarters the ability to increase revenues in different kind of environments. That’s first part. So I’m not going to give you the split, but we are relatively confident we’ll be there.
Now the second part of it, the healthcare deal, offshoring and so on. So as I have repeatedly said over the last several quarters, it’s not one deal. It’s multiple deals in multiple parts of one customer plus multiple deals in other parts of the healthcare ecosystem. Now if you look at it, this offshoring also, we have said it has started to happen, it is happening every quarter and we are winning newer Business also in the biggest customer and other customers. So I wouldn’t be too worried about that. Does it give us a margin lever? Yeah, it does. So does — if you look at it, if you study our financials this quarter itself, our subcontracting costs went up and that went up in this quarter because we basically did a better consolidation with a large BFSI deal win that we announced last quarter and that also gives us a lever. So in a running business, there are multiple things that are happening, which provide you the levers. And please keep in mind, if our entry run-rate is 15.6% EBIT and we work diligently towards improving it. It already is at a good clip with respect to the last year. So I leave that and I sincerely believe we are on a good trajectory both from a revenue and a margin perspective and we’ll deal with the macro as it comes. Our intent would be to give it our best, grow better than the sector and we’ll see. Now in terms of the part of it, look, is a good tool for anyone, whether it is an enterprise software company or an enterprise to look at doing the same with less. And so I sincerely think if we are able to execute the way we are thinking, the percolation should happen at the same pace as we would have thought and a tough macro would actually give an incentive to companies, whether they are portfolio companies having multiple products to adopt or enterprises to do that. But we’ll let things pan-out. We are fairly confident of the traction that we are seeing in the market. Obviously, if the macro becomes tougher, the growth rate will be related, but we’ll let that out.
Unidentified Participant
Thanks a lot, Sandeep. Thanks for that. If I could just chime in with one small follow-up. On the $5 billion FY ’31 aspiration, any update on acquisitions over there? And I mean, are we closer to finalizing anything over there? What areas are we looking at? Just a small update would be very helpful. Thanks.
Sandeep Kalra
So look, if there is an update, we’ll clearly Call-IT out, we may even do a call if we do something. Now in terms of our acquisition strategy, just to remind everyone, there are two or three pivots there. First, we have very clearly said we want to do a revenue diversification. So if we do a scaled acquisition, it may be in Europe or related areas.
Second, we have said we will do capability-led acquisitions, but it is in the US to basically further our journey in the AI space or in a micro vertical or some vertical of the BFSI or healthcare kind of verticals. And third, there are some horizontal use cases in Gen AI like we did in contact center space or we did the acquisition to bring in more capabilities to round-up our Gen AI offering.
So those are the pivots. If you have anything to announce, we’ll call for a call and we’ll announce so. But at any point in time, we are evaluating multiple assets. That’s all I can say.
Unidentified Participant
Thank you. All the best.
Operator
Thanks. Thank you. The next question is from Dipesh.
Unidentified Participant
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. Just want to get sense about the macro uncertainty, whether we are seeing let’s say, some kind of delay in ramp-up, deal closure, decision-making elongated as well as some cancellation. So if you can give some sense compared to, let’s say, three months late, how you are finding overall situation, you indicated in the — by client, but if you can give some more detail on it and whether it put an implication in terms of deal signing, what we have very strong deal intake signing over last few quarters, whether you expect some bearing on it because of overall condition?
And the second one I have on Saswa. If you can give some sense about let’s say, how Saswa is in overall revenue pull for us. Any quantified number or qualitative color compared to, let’s say, four quarters late, how Saswai is impacting overall either deal pipeline, deal booking or revenue, if you can give some context. Thanks.
Sandeep Kalra
Okay. So lots of questions there. I’ll try and summarize it faster because we have eight minutes in the call. So Divesh, two, three things. In terms of the macro-environment, see, when the US election results were announced, there was a euphoria around the certainty being and people had started like looking at a positive economic uptick and so on and so forth.
So they were — the discussion that started becoming healthier and newer things were being thought about. But in the last month-to six-weeks, the way that things have gone, there are peers in our customers’ mind and they really are seeing an uncertain kind of an environment. Things are very kind of fluid, if I may say so. Having said that, we have not seen any cancellations. Let me put it sit.
We have not seen any cancellations. We are seeing a certain amount of feet dragging in terms of deal closures. I do believe personally in our industry, we will need more pipeline to be able to do the bookings, whether it’s persistent or somebody else. And so we are at it. And we may do investments in sales and marketing and in our go-to-market accordingly. And I will leave it there.
But from overall perspective, again, these are fluid things, things may change over the next one, two months, but things have slowed down. So that’s where I’ll put it. Now in terms of, we have no intent of announcing Saswa revenues, etc. We are using Saswa two-ways. We are using to enable deal wins at-scale and implementation at-scale. And a number of times when we fit, the customer may not necessarily buy a Saswa, but the customers understand our capabilities.
They may leverage our capabilities to help them build a Saswa equivalent micro platform for their own business use-case or in their overall, let’s say, data plumbing, data engineering kind of a thing. To give you an example, right now, if I look at the last 12 months, our data practice has grown by 56% against the company growth rate that you’re seeing.
So there is multiple benefits of that and there are use cases where we are going to software companies and taking over entire products in an outcome basis for leveraging productivity gains and so on. So that is where it is and it is a significant part of us growing at the levels we are. So I’ll leave it there.
Unidentified Participant
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. The next question is from Vipur Singhal.
Unidentified Participant
Yeah, hi. I hope I’m audible. Thanks for the opportunity and congrats, Sandeep and team for a very solid quarter yet again. Sandeep, my question was on — related to the macro. I know you’ve answered it multiple parts before, but if we hear the commentary of other players up till now, I think manufacturing and retail vertical are the two verticals which seem to weaken the most because of the tariff uncertainty because of the input costs that looking at.
Now these are the two verticals, which of course, we don’t have much and that kind of insulates us from the impact to a large extent. But given our target of $2 billion and $5 billion and our plans to maybe incubate new verticals, where are we on the plans to basically look at these verticals? How are we looking at this?
And how do you see them playing out, let’s say, any, I mean, let’s say, milestones that we could see in these over the next, let’s say, one or two years.
Sandeep Kalra
So thank, so two-parts to it. First, the key pivot for us going to 2 billion and beyond 2 billion to 5 billion is going into micro verticals in the existing verticals that we have. And we have said it multiple times. See, in any economy, in any GDP, if you were to bisected, BFSI and healthcare are the largest vendors.
And we have a fairly good business, but a small-business as compared to many of our peers. And so we believe whether it is that or the capability that we have historically on our product engineering side gives us enough addressable market to be able to grow at a significant level. So that is the thing first and from an organic perspective and even tuck-in perspective, we will do this.
Second, if we want to go into the newer verticals, whether it is manufacturing or others, we may do as we go along acquisitions so that we enter into it with a dominant force rather than incubate and be a weaker player in that. So we have clearly laid out our aspirations. We are on the path. If you look at it, we are pretty much midway to $2 billion and we’ll keep executing on each one of these. And we talked about our M&A strategy earlier in this call as well.
Unidentified Participant
Got it. If I could just maybe start on that a bit more. I think given the run-rate that we have at this point of time, I think the path to $200 is fairly visible. Do you think this — I mean, I know you mentioned that we probably look at other verticals, but do you think these three verticals can actually take us to that $5 billion mark or to reach that mark, we will definitely need some new — I mean we feel-good yeah. So look, these verticals have enough addressable market for us to keep growing for the next seven, and between now, if we look at it, we are at 25.
We are talking of 31. We have enough time to take decisions on adding a vertical or multiple verticals as we go along. For now, we are heads-down in execution. We have rolled-out as a vertical strategy within the company. We have hired the leadership of verticals in many places and we are on that path to execute on that.
And as opportunistically, if we get a very good acquisition target, which fulfills the various criteria we have laid out, we’ll execute on that. But rest assured, look at the last five years, $481 million was our revenue for FY ’19, ’20 in that range, right? We have tripled the company from there in five years.
Sandeep Kalra
Thank you. Got it.
Operator
The next question is from Nitin, Sandeep, Pineet, Saurabh.
Unidentified Participant
So wanted your thoughts on the utilization, it’s an all-time high. How is it operationally changing for us?
Unidentified Participant
We have never operated at these levels. So is there a sort of new band we can operate at? So that’s number-one. Number two is this, wanted your thoughts on the GCC business that we have, how large is this and how has it sort of evolved since you sort of started? So that’s the — that’s the second thing. So I think these are two primary questions.
Sandeep Kalra
So I’ll try and quickly answer this. We have just two minutes left in the call. So as far as utilization is concerned, we are comfortable in this brand. So there are two-parts to it. One, I can say with pride, there is enough and more people who would love to join our company. So we have come to a point where people are able to hire is not a question book.
Two, the market environment as such, there are only a hand few of companies which are growing. So the award for talent is not at that footing that we need to have a big bench and so on and so forth. So we are fairly comfortable where we are and these are things that we will keep tuning in-line with the macroeconomic environment, both from a cost and a demand perspective.
We’ll see where it goes. In terms of GCC, GCCs are a fair play for us for a fairly long period of time. If you look at any of our top customers, we have co-existed, we have cooperated with their GCC and their parent. I can’t quantify a percentage for you on this call, but maybe we’ll get back to you offline on this.
So with that, operator, I would want to just summarize the call and then you can pretty much close the call. So look, it is a tough macro-environment out there. We have a good pipeline. We have a good set of customers. We have scaled our customers, whether you look at any of the categories we talked about, whether it is greater than 5 million or greater than 75 million, we are confident of delivering within the same macro or better than industry results.
And whatever hand is given to us, we’ll try to do our best-in that. With that, we’ll stop here and we’ll look-forward to meeting you and giving you an update in the next few months. Thank you.
Unidentified Speaker
Thank you,.
Operator
Thank you very much to Per Systems management team. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Systems Limited, that concludes today’s call friends. Thank you for joining us and you may now disconnect your line and exit the.
Sandeep Kalra
Thank you everyone